That wasn’t going to happen.

7

The old lady heard the knock on the door for the third time. ‘I’m coming!’ she called out. ‘Bejazus, I’m coming!’ She lifted the saucepan of boiling water and green beans off the hob, grabbed her wheeled Zimmer frame, and began making her way across the kitchen.

Then the phone started ringing. She hesitated. Her brother rang every day at 7 p.m. on the dot, whether he was in England or France, to check she was okay. It was 7 p.m. She grabbed the phone, with its extra-large numbers for her failing vision, and shouted, over the Emmerdale theme tune blaring from the television, ‘Hold on a minute, will you!’

But it wasn’t her brother’s voice. It was a younger man with a silky purr. ‘I only need a moment of your time.’

‘There’s someone at the door!’ she shouted back, fumbling with the TV remote to turn the sound down. Then she clamped her arthritic hand over the mouthpiece. Despite her years, she still had a strong voice. About the only thing left of her that was still strong, she rued. ‘You’ll have to wait. I’m on the phone,’ she hollered at the front door. Then she lifted her hand. ‘I’m back with you, but you’ll have to be quick,’ she said with her Irish lilt.

‘A good friend of yours told me to call you,’ the man said.

‘And who would that be?’

‘Gerard Scott.’

‘Gerard Scott?’

‘He said to say hello!’

‘I don’t know any Gerard Scott, for sure.’

‘We’re saving him two thousand five hundred pounds a year off his heating bill.’

‘And how would you be doing that?’ she asked, a tad impatiently as she stared at the door, worrying about her beans staying too long in the hot water.

‘We have a representative working in your area next week. Perhaps I could make an appointment at a time convenient for you?’

‘A representative for what, exactly?’

‘Loft insulation.’

‘Loft insulation? Why would I be needing loft insulation?’

‘We are England’s leading specialists. The insulation we put in is so effective it will have fully paid for itself in just nine years from savings on your fuel bills.’

‘Nine years, you say?’

‘That’s right, madam.’

‘Well now, I’m ninety-eight years old. That would be a high-class problem, I’d say, for me to think I’m going to be worrying about my heating bills when I’m a hundred and seven. But thank you kindly.’

She hung up, then carried on towards the front door. ‘I’m coming! I’m on my way!’

Her brother had been trying to convince her for a long time to sell the house and move into sheltered accommodation, but why the hell should she? This had been her home for over fifty years. Here she had lived happily with her husband, Gordon, who had passed away fifteen years ago, had raised her four children, who had all predeceased her, and had created the once beautiful garden, which she still continued to work in. All her memories were in this house, as well as all the fine paintings and antiques she and her husband had collected during their lives – guided by her brother’s discerning eye. She’d been uprooted once in her life, and it was not going to happen again. She was adamant that when she left this place she loved so much, it would be feet first.

Her only concessions to her brother’s concerns were the panic button that hung from a cord around her neck, and the housekeeper who came twice a week.

She peered through the spyhole in the front door. In the light of the summer evening she saw two middle-aged men in brown uniforms, with identity tags hung from chains around their necks.

She removed the safety chain and opened the door.

They smiled politely. ‘Sorry to disturb you, madam,’ the one on the right said. ‘We’re from the Water Board.’ He held up his identity card for her to read.

She did not have her glasses on, but she liked his Irish accent. The face on the card was a little blurred, but it looked like the face of the shaven-headed man in front of her. Richard Carroll, she thought his name read, but she couldn’t be sure.

‘How can I help you, gentlemen?’

‘We’re investigating a water leak. Have you noticed a drop in water pressure during the past twenty-four hours?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I can’t say that I have.’ But, she knew, there was a lot of stuff she did not notice these days. Much though it angered her, she was increasingly becoming dependent on others. Although she still kept a tight grip on everything she could.

‘Do you mind if we come in and check your water pressure? We’d hate you to be charged for water you’re not using.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t be wanting that either,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye, in her soft Dublin accent. All these bastard utilities were trying to rob you blind all the time and she wasn’t one to be having any of it. She scrutinized the phone bills, the electricity bills, the gas and the water. ‘I’ve been thinking the water charges are high of late.’

‘All the more indication of a problem,’ Richard Carroll said, apologetically.

‘You’d better be coming in.’

Holding the Zimmer with one hand, she stepped aside to let the men enter, then closed the door behind them.

Almost immediately she did not like the way their eyes began roaming. At the fine oil paintings hanging on the walls, and then at the Louis XIV table in the hallway. The Georgian tallboy. The Georgian chest. The two Chippendale chairs. Bargains, once, all of them, pointed out by her brother, who knew a thing or two about antiques of all descriptions.

‘Where would you like to start your investigations, gentlemen?’

She saw the blur of the man’s fist only a fraction of a second before it struck her stomach, punching all the wind out of her. She doubled up, her frail hand clutching at the panic button.

But it was ripped off her neck long before she could press it.

8

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, PC Susi Holiday thought. A sturdily built woman of twenty-eight, with brown curly hair and a constantly cheerful face. That line had been running through her head repeatedly ever since she had woken up this morning. She’d had a day off yesterday, and much to her husband James’s incredulity had spent much of it watching all six episodes of the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, binge-eating junk food, and smoking an entire packet of fags. She was like that. One week all healthy, working out at the gym, not smoking, then the next being a total slob.

Now, irreverently, she decided that another truth universally acknowledged is that no one looks their best sitting on a toilet seat with their trousers round their ankles.

Especially not if they are dead.

Memo to self. Please, please, please don’t die on the loo.

The need to go to the lavatory was a frequent precursor to a heart attack. All too many did die that way.

Like the plump old man in front of them, in the dingy, narrow little toilet in the squalid Housing Association flat with its bare pale-blue walls and unwashed underwear, socks and shirts lying all over the floor in every room. It smelled rank: a mixture of a rancid, cheesy reek and, the worst smell in the world, a decaying human. Its tenant was named Ralph Meeks, and this was whom she presumed, with revulsion tinged with sadness, she was now staring at. Like all G5s who had been dead for more than a couple of days, he looked more like a waxwork than a real human being. She always found the total stillness of a cadaver both eerie and fascinating.

His bulky frame was wedged between the walls. There were liver spots on his hands, the crimson and green blotches of advanced decomposition on his face and visible parts of his body. An insistent swarm of blowflies crawled over his face and neck and hands, and buzzed around him.